Holy moly it’s a game you can play on your computer. Another Oceanspirit Dennis one, I might add, this one’s called Blades of Passion and it’s pretty nice, if I do say so myself. It deals with some heavily Freudian psychological issues concerning OSD’s choice of sexuality, so some of you might pussy out.

In addition!

I’ve been reviewed on the AGS Blog by a fellow named James “Dualnames” Spanos. He’s from Greece! I still wish it was John Stamos instead. We talked about games and such things, so if you so happen to be so inclined you can so read it by placing your cursor over these words and left-clicking.

Finally!

I wrote another review for HardyDev about a glorious game called The Journey Down: Over The Edge, which I fully admit is better than Blades of Passion in just about every way. Read it if you want.

It’s called Vector Vendetta, and it’s flippin’ sweet. A bullet hell arcade shooter staring interesting geometrical shapes sounds kinda familiar right? But unlike Geometry Wars, VV is 100% free and able to be played by you right now by clicking these words.

If I want to graduate on time and receive both my Electrical Engineering and Computer Science degrees, which I do, my school forces me to pay up and take a summer course completely unrelated to my major, which I am. Thus, I’m stuck in the night-class purgatory that is microeconomics. I’ve had three classes so far and am fairly sure that I have learned everything there is to know about economics. If you, for some demented reason, want to enter this strange field, here is all you need to know:

A fourth grade level understanding of mathematics. Seems those three semesters of Calculus were all for naught, at least in economics. Here is a comprehensive list of all the mathematical concepts I have used in this course: averaging two numbers, the point-slope formula, solving a simple single variable algebraic equation, and percent difference.

Supply and demand. High supply and low demand mean low prices; low supply and high demand mean high prices. Or something like that. There’s other factors, but we’re not supposed to consider them because we’d have to solve equations with more than one variable. Gasp!

Profit is total revenue minus total cost. If reading this made you feel enlightened, then you have a promising career projecting the future of the national economy on MSNBC.

Those cheeseburger-flavored Doritos are kinda neat the first time, but get really gross really fast. High-level stuff, I know.

So, in short, if you are not at all mathematically inclined and want a big fancy piece of paper saying how special you are, economics is for you. Hopefully, I’ll survive until the fall semester, when Physics 3 and Probability will have a chance to revive my dead brain cells.

Also, totally unrelated, but you should keep your eyes peeled for this sweet game that’s emerging very soon from the creative womb of my good friend and coworker, Igor Hardy.

Oceanspirit Dennis

The basic idea behind OSD is that through all manner of unusual events, I ended up drawing the above picture and a hero was born. He is the forbidden lovechild of Batman and Cloud Strife, torn between a life of crime-fighting and being a typical JRPG protagonist poof. As such, he is perfect game-starring material and has so far been the focus of five games. Here they are in chronological order.

So you can see the guy has quite a career ahead of him. In fact, if downloads aren’t your thing, you can actually play Scourge of the Underworld right here in your browser by clicking these words! Pretty sweet, huh? One thing of note, part of OSD’s genesis involved a forum troll with a particularly loose grasp of the Queen’s English, so a couple of those games have appropriately incoherent dialog as a homage. Not mine, however, which instead includes voice acting! NICE. Here’s Oceanspirit Dennis’ new look, too.

Also, I played the first three hours of Metal Gear Solid 3 with a friend the other day. Or, more accurately, I watched two hours of MGS3 and played an hour.

Been a while since one of these. As usual, if you disagree, you are wrong.

Star Wars Prequels

Two Towers

Halo 3

Spider-Man 3

Batman and Robin

Rocky Balboa

Terminator 3

Pirates 2 and 3

Guitar Hero World Tour

Sonic games made after 1994

New article by me on Hardydev about a crappy game that I hated. Let’s just say I had more fun skewering it than playing it. Another one that, in case you hadn’t already figured out, was an April Fool’s joke.

Dentists

It’s a well-known fact that all dentists are completely evil. This is never more clear than once every six months when I go in for my appointment. I seriously think they have it in for me because I don’t floss enough. They started off by hooking me up to the whirling X-ray machine of doom and bombarded my mouth with high-frequency electromagnetic radiation. Afterwards, they strapped me in a very uncomfortable chair in an extremely bright room and started taking pictures of the insides of my mouth, presumably to sell to some perverted teeth fetishists on the internet. It was at this point I realized that I was now at the mercies of a woman who clearly believes in “no pain no gain,” perhaps a little too much. As she tore into my gums, she began interrogating me, well aware of the fact that my mouth was busy being assaulted by her sharp implements of terror.

After a jolly good while of this, she decided to mix things up by smearing poor tasting goop in and around my mouth with a mechanical sander, pausing every so often to inject heavily fluorinated water into my increasingly uncomfortable mouth. She wasn’t particularly good at this bit, so half the water ended up bouncing into my upward-facing eyes. When she grew board of drowning me, she stuck a little vacuum tube in my mouth and told me with terrible smugness to swish, as if she knew I wanted to spew the vile mixture in her big, stupid face. After that, the head dentist came in and told me my teeth looked fine. So then I went home.

Games

In completely and totally unrelated news, them ol’ vidya-games are still up to no good. I’ve pretty much decided that Dragon Age isn’t my thing, but I might give it another shot after a cooling off period. I bought Call of Duty: World at War for the deceptively low price of $20. You might think that I say $20 is “deceptive” because the game was really worth much more, but you would be wrong. It was deceptive in the way that it convinced me to buy a wholly mediocre game with AI on the level of Pong. I still can’t stop playing Mass Effect 2, I got back on the horse with Bioshock, and I bought some new songs for Rock Band, so all-in-all a good bunch.

Movies

Recently, I’ve been watching the movies people accost me for having ignored. With movies like Alien(s), No Country for Old Men, and In Bruges, they are completely right. With Avatar, they are dead wrong. Something about that movie just bugs me, and the more I think about it, the more I want to stab James Cameron in the throat with cattle prod. I’m not sure where he went wrong. Aliens rocked, Avatar sucked, but why? As usual, I choose to blame CGI, something that they had significantly less of in 1986. I don’t care how detailed the digital models are or how expensive the motion capture was, the Na’vi look computer generated and no amount of lens flares will get them out of the uncanny valley. I also choose to blame 3D and the massive headache it gave me.

TV

Aw, who am I kidding? The only TV show I ever watch is Lost, which is slogging its way through its sixth season. The show has taken a significant dip in quality this time around, not to be confused with the dip last season, or the dip in season three. I’m beginning to lose faith in what I once thought was the greatest show in the history of shows, since no season has yet to live up to the awesomeness of the first. The writers have definitely realized that they can just make crap up and no one will call them out on it, so the questions created to questions answered ratio is hovering around 3.5. They don’t have long to wrap everything up, so they best be kicking into solvey-solvey mode pretty soon. And why the hell do they keep getting rid of all the black characters? Michael, Walt, Mr. Eko, Justin, they’re all suspiciously gone. Just sayin’.

Everyone needs a celebrity beef. Loading Ready Run had one going with Uwe Boll for a while and I have friend who loathes Dane Cook with all his being. Why not, I figured. North does have the most ubiquitous and generic voice in gaming. I mean pick any of the dozens of characters he’s voiced and chances are they’ll be essentially the same smug American douche. For example, Shadow Complex would’ve been a much better game if I could have enjoyed the Metroidvania exploration without Nolan constantly cracking wise through his characterless avatar. I vote that instead of hiring Mr. North to voice their cocky, brown-haired prick, studios should seek the vocal talents of Sir Sean Connery. I could just imagine Nathan Drake speaking with the same voice as James Bond.